| |
 Illustration by Aina Seerdan | The place I’ve lived that I remember most wistfully, with the most painful pull of nostalgia, is a place where I was always waiting. For the three years I lived there, I waited, not only for the large questions to be answered — who I would become and who I would love, (because I was young then and knew little) — but also for my smallest desires to be satisfied. I waited all week for my Sunday long-distance call to my mother. I waited three months for Thai spring rolls, first identifying a person who might be willing to drive me the two hours to the nearest Thai restaurant (I didn’t have a car), then befriending him, and finally suggesting the trip. Mostly, I waited for music. Since the nearest record store was hundreds of miles away, I waited six months to be chosen by the public radio station as a volunteer DJ. Each Wednesday, I’d bike down the mesa, the Milky Way pulsing above me, and from 6 to 9 a.m., I’d listen to, and submit the early-waking ranchers to, my favorite songs (by Liz Phair and Pavement and Dusty Springfield). When my shift ended and I headed to my paying job, I could feel the songs leave me, feel myself waiting for them again. You might be wondering where this place was. What purgatorial abyss? It was a small town in the Mountain West, where I’d moved in order to write for a newspaper. It was 1995, which meant the Internet was a museum where the exhibits rarely changed. At the time, I had a crush on an Israeli man whom I’d met when he was visiting a local farmer. He’d returned to Jerusalem, but one night I found him again while searching through the farmer’s personal website (the first of such I’d ever seen). The two of them were tan, with wry smiles, in white beach chairs at the Dead Sea. I looked at this picture most evenings, once everyone left the office and I could access a computer with the Internet. Alone, I felt a voyeuristic thrill from sneaking up on their photo, but it was a neutered prowl, the way a house cat stalks and pounces upon a stuffed animal. While the photo promised connectivity to the faraway world, it gave me no actual connection. After I stared for a while, I would find myself neither sated nor distracted, but lit up in my loneliness. The office would have grown dark by the time I shut down the computer and walked out the door. I’d bike home thinking about the fact that nobody knew where I was. It would be days before my mother called again. I didn’t have the money to call my friends back in San Francisco. What were they doing? Where were they eating? Who were they seeing? In the cabin I rented, three miles away from the office, I ate chickpeas from a can. There were no lights outside, no other houses, just the mesa and a mountain. Inside my house, spaghetti-sauce stains dripped down the wood paneling. From my boom box, Dylan sang “Blood on the Tracks” over and over, his the only voice I heard. When I think about that time, I wonder how I bore such silence. No signals came toward me from the world, no news, no chatter. These days, I can’t sit for five minutes on a bus without checking my phone. How did my brain work? That person is a stranger to me now. I’m not trying to romanticize a slower pace. I’m not advocating a regressive purge of the computers and phones that keep us so connected, our small desires so quickly met. But I’d like to remember what it felt like when we tried to touch the outlines of our waiting and there were no outlines. When our waiting stretched as far as the night sky. In that mountain town, all my romantic relationships were with objects. In addition to the photo of the Israeli, I was in a relationship with a CD at the radio station by a singer I’d never heard of before. His witty and angry lyrics, which revealed him to be the horny son of Holocaust survivors, seemed the perfect antithesis to the pastoral cheerfulness of Colorado, the constant “Rocky Mountain High.” This was just before Christmas, which I spent back in California, learning how my friends had moved on without me. Where nobody had heard of my folk singer. When I returned to Colorado, snow covered the mesas like a white ocean under blue skies, and it stayed until April. One Wednesday morning, I was absentmindedly reading a list of announcements on-air and I found myself saying the folk singer’s name. He was coming to perform in our town. Nobody performed in our town — it was as if I’d conjured him with my longing. Two weeks later, I arrived early at the yoga studio where he was to perform. I claimed a folding chair in the front row. Everyone I knew filed in. The newspaper staff and the Forest Service employees and the hippies who’d built houses out of straw or tires. Not the ranchers, though, or the coal miners. The folk singer told stories in a drawl that I decided was an affectation of an affectation. He was doing Bobby Zimmerman becoming Bob Dylan, and in my crushed-out solipsism, I believed that only I noticed the layers of irony. At the end of his set, he said that he needed a ride to the nearest Greyhound station, an hour and a half to the north in Glenwood Springs. Then the lights came on, and everyone filed out. Waiting is wanting, plus time; it’s that ache beneath the rib cage. If I lived in that town now, and the folk singer came, there’d be so many ways to ease that ache. I might ask to take a selfie with him and post it, waiting for the Instagram hearts to warm me up. I might tweet to him the next day. Great show! I’d hope he might follow me back. I wouldn’t ask for more. But back then, without such options, I lied. I approached the folk singer as he unplugged his amp. I told him I was headed to the Roaring Fork River in the morning to kayak, and it would be no problem to drop him off on my way. “Wow,” he said. “You kayak?” I didn’t really. I had one friend in this town, a gregarious, brilliant woman named Lisa who kayaked with the ease she did everything. I’d been spending my Saturdays driving an hour to a public swimming pool where kayakers were allowed to practice on the waveless waters. I’d sit in her boat, attached to it by a neoprene skirt. She’d push me into the water and then, screaming from the side of the pool, try to coach me to roll over, returning upright, as kayakers must do when a rapid pushes them under. It was a forced drowning, and I hated it. Each time, I used the emergency strap and released myself from the boat, swimming madly to the surface. “Sure, I kayak,” I told the folk singer, “so we’ll need to leave really early.” I don’t think I slept that night. I was outside Lisa’s house before 5 a.m., tying her kayak to the roof of her car for verisimilitude. When I drove to the mesa where the folk singer was staying, I found him waiting in the blue dawn with his guitar — a winsome pose all folk singers are contractually obligated to make. As we drove away, he rolled down his window and shouted into the emptiness, “Let it be known that I love it here. I love it!” I loved it there, too. I’d loved it since the day I’d arrived, but I hadn’t fully realized it until that moment, when someone was there to witness my love and to share it. One thing about living in a state of prolonged waiting is that you know when it’s over. The drive to Glenwood Springs offered a series of delights. We drove up a mountain pass cluttered with aspens dressed in their new greens, descended into a valley presided over by giant peaks, skimmed alongside the Crystal River. Impulsively, I pulled over and led the folk singer through the brush to where, along the river, sulfuric water burbled up. We’d been talking the whole drive, finding commonalities like beachcombers searching for shells, and it seemed now like anything could happen. We could rip off our clothes, plunge into the river. But it was riotous with snowmelt, overflowing the rocks where I usually found hot water. Still, the possibility of adventure glimmered around us. I mentioned Glenwood Springs’ eponymous hot springs, a vast pool of mineral water. The folk singer said he’d happily take a later bus, but what about my friends waiting by the river for me? I stopped at a pay phone and pretended to call my made-up friends. The trip, I reported back, was fortuitously postponed! I have no idea whether he believed me, but a short while later, we were renting bathing suits and lockers amid the fug of chlorine and baby powder, the cement wet under our bare feet. What is a happy ending but a true cessation, however brief, of waiting? Like starvation before a meal, all the waiting I’d done heightened the joy I felt that day. We didn’t even make out. But we carried each other on the water, through clusters of old ladies and babies in their water wings. He held me, and then I held him. I remember the way my pubes, climbing around my rented bathing suit, reached for the water’s surface like sea plants. I remember the bumps on his back. We were kind to each other, unembarrassed in each other’s arms. It was a kindness dependent on our understanding of transience. We had no camera, no chance of being seen by my friends or his fans. Everything about this day would slip away. Late that afternoon, I finally drove him to the Greyhound, and we exchanged addresses. He disappeared as he’d appeared, a nod from the universe, telling me: You do exist. Driving home, I knew what lay ahead. I had only a few glorious hours before I parked at Lisa’s house and untied her kayak and began waiting for a letter to appear in my PO box. I would check the mail two or three times a day, although it was delivered only once. But I knew how to wait. Heather Abel, a writer living in Massachusetts, has just published her debut novel, The Optimistic Decade, which takes place in a small Colorado town in a time before the Internet. | | | | |
 Illustration by Ras | I learned at an early age that my great-grandmother was Ida B. Wells, a woman who dedicated her life to fighting every form of injustice, whether based on race, gender, or class. In addition to being one of the most influential journalists in history, she was involved in the suffrage movement, was one of the founders of the NAACP, founded the first kindergarten for black children in Chicago, and created a rooming house for Southern migrants. Let’s give this some context: My great-grandmother was born a slave in 1862 in Mississippi and came of age during Reconstruction. In 1892, the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis propelled her to investigate, chronicle, report, and speak in graphic detail about the realities of lynching. She wrote numerous articles and pamphlets to document this domestic terrorism, bringing to light the extraordinary levels of violence and injustice perpetrated against black women and men. Through her work, my great-grandmother countered the false narratives that white journalists and newspapers used to justify brutality toward black people. She fought to develop a culture where women of African descent were fully empowered and where the kind of treatment based on gender, race, and other disparities could be erased. Because of her outspokenness, people threatened her life. She lost everything she owned when a white mob destroyed her Memphis printing press, and she was effectively exiled from the South. Yet, despite that enormous loss, she continued to fight for justice. She traveled to the United Kingdom to inform the world about how the United States treated its own citizens. In the midst of her crusade, she met and married an attorney named Ferdinand L. Barnett. They ultimately settled in Chicago, and Ida hyphenated her name to Wells-Barnett. She was a pioneer in many ways — from her journalism to her feminism — and her influence on both is evident today. Yet too few Americans know of her. I’ve worked for years to change this. In the late 1980s, I worked on the PBS documentary film Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice, but I realize that not everyone watches documentary films. I’ve edited two books, Ida in Her Own Words and Ida From Abroad, that include her original writings, but I’m aware that not everyone enjoys reading. I have spoken about the life and legacy of my great-grandmother at panels, conferences, symposiums, churches, and other events, but I know that I am reaching only a small segment of the population. I am involved with the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum in Holly Springs, Mississippi, but I understand that museums are not for everyone. Public monuments are a way to help educate and inspire the broad public. They make history accessible in ways that are visual and tangible, and they allow people to interact with historical information presented in a physical form. But African American women who have contributed so much to this country are grossly underrepresented in monument form. According to the National Park Service, only three of 152 national monuments in this country honor women, and Harriet Tubman is the sole African American woman. The omission of our contributions hurts everyone. Exposure to almost exclusively white men stifles our country. The trajectory of my great-grandmother Ida B. Wells’s life was formed by her tireless commitment to uncovering the truth and fighting for justice and equality. I find it incomprehensible that there is no monument to her work. While the debate about Confederate monuments rages on, it is time to focus on creating monuments to honor African American women so we can be recognized and celebrated. Over the past ten years, I have worked with the Ida B. Wells Commemorative Art Committee to have my great-grandmother honored with a monument in Chicago, where she lived the last 35 years of her life. The outpouring of support for the monument on my great-grandmother’s July 16 birthday was mind-boggling. I was hoping people would want to help but never imagined that more than 900 people would respond and donate over $40,000 in one day. It was a true testament to how much she means to people all over this country. She was a significant force and should be celebrated and known to all. She was a heroine who spent her life fighting for the potential of what our country can be. Michelle Duster is an author, speaker, and professor at Columbia College Chicago. She has written, published, and contributed to nine books, and leads the Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation. Learn more at MLDwrites.com. | | | | |  Illustration by Rachel Chew | My father passes when I am 28. My father, a small, papery man, the smell of tobacco deep in his skin, born in Singapore and buried in Midland, Australia, in a graveyard much like one he’d liked as a boy — stumbled upon when he rode the wrong bus — a peaceful place, he’d said, because all the headstones were the same, uniform heights and shapes. I tell my sister that at least our dad had many adventures, and she says, “I don’t know if he saw it that way. He said to me, ‘I feel like I’ve been fighting all my life.’” My father passes, and over the next month, people come up to me and say that he sponsored this family or that family when they migrated to Australia, that he was the reason they migrated in the first place; they say he paved the way for Asian lawyers in Perth. People talk of my father before he was my father, before he was Charles the migrant — a dockyard worker in his teens, a scruffy long-haired rebel, a ringleader of sit-in protests, a cash-strapped hitchhiker peddling counterfeit watches and blood. I am born in Perth a few weeks after my father’s own father passes, well after my due date — my mother says it’s as if I knew that things were already stressful, and I was waiting for a more convenient time to appear. I am christened Elizabeth Jia-Chi Tan, but my father also calls me Penguin because of the waddling, side-to-side way that I learn to walk. I am born soft around the edges and seem to stay that way, a pliable, flightless sort of child, Charles’s third, the baby. My father passes, and, at a memorial service, his friend wonders why an anti-colonialist would name his daughters Elizabeth and Victoria; indeed, our father’s decision to leave his beloved Singapore for Australia is a topic of bitter reflection in our childhood. He scrunches his face up at Western food; he never permits us to sleep over our friends’ houses; when he discovers I have a white boyfriend, he asks my sister if she can introduce me to any nice Chinese guys. He refuses to give his blessing to my sister and her white fiancé. My father and mother never teach us Hokkien (let alone Mandarin); it is instead their preferred language for arguing with each other when their children are within earshot. Nevertheless, I come to understand two important expressions: - ciak peng: it’s time to eat (literally, “eat rice”)
- ang mo: white person (literally, “red-haired”)
But, with age, we start to understand our father’s suspicion — or, perhaps, we had always understood it, in encounters so mundane that they slip from memory: passed over as a teammate, a customer worth attending to, a friend. In third grade, my French teacher asks the class if our parents speak a language other than English at home. When I say Hokkien, she says, “Do you mean Chinese?” My father passes, and his casket is adorned with banksias. My father passes, and, at the family barbecue after his funeral, my uncle rubs my shoulder and says, “You’ll always be his penguin.” In primary school, I am ashamed of my Chinese middle name — I lie and say it is Jennifer; after too many years of muddled pronunciations, I have my middle name removed from my university records. My sister says that the “Chi” is an Anglicized approximation of the actual pronunciation — the ch sound is closer to tz. She tells me that the first character means a precious piece of jewelry; the second character means auspicious, lucky. I practice saying my name, and I can never get it right. My own name cannot fit inside my mouth. Every child of a migrant learns this without knowing how they learned it: You have to do more than pass. You will be an exemplar, whether you like it or not. So I strive, and excel, and my reputation not so much precedes me but is perhaps decided for me. My first-grade teacher balls up my letter to Santa and hurls it across the room in front of the entire class because it isn’t sophisticated enough. In high school, I am unwittingly drawn into rivalries with smart boys who track my test scores like stock-market speculators; I am nicknamed Squid. My father passes, and we play hits from the Beatles at his funeral. My father passes, and his friends in Singapore sing “The House of the Rising Sun” in his memory. The first time I don’t pass is in Chinese school, worrisome hours on a Saturday afternoon, a test returned with a red 30%. My sister rises quickly to the advanced classes while I flounder alone in indecipherable characters; my pencil strokes lean like poorly built houses on stilts, as if blown over by the broad Australian vowels my mouth cannot help but create. English: the only way to prove myself. “You speak very well,” says a customer at the cake store where I work in my early twenties. When I inform him that English is my only language, he backpedals: “No, I mean, you speak very well, very clearly.” At university, I sense that my classmates are quick to turn away from me when it is time to form groups for assignments. “Make sure you answer a question in the first class and speak loudly with your Australian accent,” my boyfriend at the time says, and though he jests, I wonder if this is the strategy that I’ve already unconsciously adopted my whole life: speak up early, demonstrate Australianness quickly. Is it real or imagined, that softening in strangers, once I speak and they realize I am one of them? My father passes, and my mother says to my sister, “I didn’t get to tell him that all is forgiven.” My father passes, and I have to wonder what my mother was like before she was my mother, before she was Cynthia the migrant, Cynthia the wife of Charles. I wonder what my mother is doing in alternative timelines — Cynthia the mathematician, Cynthia the cross-country runner, Cynthia the artist. Cynthia the mother of Timothy, Vicky, and Elizabeth is an ambiguous figure, a closed oyster, brittle syllables and silence. It is only with food that she can show love, thrusting boxes of chicken rice or sushi into our hands, piling the steamboat high, scraping the last of the stir-fry onto our plates because there’s only a little bit left you might as well finish up. How devastating, then, that in the final eight months of my father’s life, he could not eat. In our childhood, my mother, embarrassed by the Singaporean cadence of her voice, makes me or my sister order pizza on the phone. My father passes — this is a common euphemism, to pass. What I mean is: my father dies. For me to pass as an Australian, a little bit of my father has to die, and a little bit of my mother has to die, and a little bit of me has to die. I am a euphemism, a stand-in for an unpleasant reality. My father passes, and, too late for him to see it, I have a piece of fiction published in Best Australian Stories. As I hold the golden volume, I want to know what he might make of it, his daughter passing unquestioningly as Australian. At no other moment do I feel more keenly the sum of my parents’ sacrifices. My father passes, and language fails. I am born shortly after my father’s own father passes, at the convenient moment. I grow into a chimera, an omen of good fortune instead of disaster. In my dazed penguin walk, I follow my sister and brother through the life our parents fought to give us; like my high-school namesake, I spread my many arms and leave my mark with ink. We are traveling toward a place that is peaceful but not immune to heartbreak; the soil is hard, the sun is hot, the vowels are wide. I sign my work with my first and last name, printed small and careful, following as much as possible a straight horizontal line — such hard-won letters, uniform heights and shapes. Elizabeth Tan (@ElzbthT) is an Australian writer and the author of Rubik. “A Life, Passing” was first published in Westerly 62.2. | | | | |  Illustration by Ghazaleh Rastgar | LEO
(July 23 to August 22)
Happy birthday, Leo! This month, if you are filled with self-centered fear, it’s time to help somebody else. If you are obsessing about somebody else, it’s time to focus on yourself for a minute. And if you feel free, congratulations — just keep doing what you are doing. VIRGO
(August 23 to September 22)
When people are talking to me, I often feel like life is elsewhere, usually somewhere deep within, away, cloistered, and sheltered from the hum of the world. Maybe you aren’t that kind of Virgo. But if you are, let’s both practice engaging in the hum a bit more attentively this month and see what surprises wait there. LIBRA
(September 23 to October 22)
Look at the thing you think you want and ask yourself why you want it. Go deep. If the answer is genuine passion, you should know that the passion lives in you and can be relit again and again, even if you don’t get this thing. And if you want what you want solely out of pride, be careful what you wish for. SCORPIO
(October 23 to November 21)
The adage “We can’t control the direction of the wind, but we can control our sails” is the only thing you have to remember this month. Also, I’d like to add that sometimes we don’t feel like we can control our sails either, and that’s OK too. SAGITTARIUS
(November 22 to December 21)
It’s easy to see that certain concepts sold to us by the media are an illusion. But for each of us, there are always goals, states of being, and ideas regarding who we should be that we buy into. What if the only thing worth having is what you have right now? That would be cool. CAPRICORN
(December 22 to January 19)
It’s lonely at the top, but it’s also lonely in the middle and at the bottom and everywhere. This month, conduct a brief interview with your loneliness. See if perhaps it isn’t actually some kind of friend, warmer than you thought, a creative space. AQUARIUS
(January 20 to February 18)
You might trust the process of life, or you might not trust the process of life, or those feelings may alternate depending on the given day or minute. But most of us have sticking points: those things we simply feel we must control, regardless of how much faith we have. Make a list of those. Make a check mark every time you are gripping one of them with an iron fist. PISCES
(February 19 to March 20)
Dismiss the retrogrades. Forget the eclipses. Erase the predictions. Ignore Saturn. Never mind the prophecies. Sleep through the new moon. The whole universe is already inside of you. The end. ARIES
(March 21 to April 19)
This month, I’m giving you a simple reminder that just because you are “supposed” to like something doesn’t mean you have to like it. Keep this in mind when it comes to art, people, careers, ideas — everything. TAURUS
(April 20 to May 20)
Waiting for the other shoe to drop is a way of protecting ourselves from fear of the unknown. I’m not telling you to stop waiting. But you should be aware that’s what you’re doing and that it has very little to do with reality. GEMINI
(May 21 to June 20)
Schadenfreude is a natural feeling. We all love to gossip and even delight in other people’s misery on occasion. But this month, if you find yourself a little more into this behavior than usual, ask yourself what your own life is missing that’s making you look outward. CANCER
(June 21 to July 22)
Sometimes it seems like it might be kind of soothing to be numb. It’s not easy having feelings. But remember, every feeling always changes, because everything changes. Also, the only good numbness isn’t numbness at all but the presence of serenity, which is underneath every feeling if you get very still. Melissa Broder is the author of the novel The Pisces (Hogarth), out now!, and four collections of poems, including Last Sext (Tin House 2016) and So Sad Today, a book of essays from Grand Central. | | | | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment